April 26 (Bloomberg) -- The themes of inequality and the 1
percent dominate the news. Critics deplore that the share of
pretax income accruing to those at the top has increased
markedly over the past 30 years and is now greater than it has
been since the 1920s.

It is suggested, too, that growth in income inequality has
been a significant contributor to the current financial crisis
and the slow recovery. President Barack Obama recently took this
position, arguing that this is dragging down the economy. The
Occupy Wall Street movement has been motivated by outrage over
the gains of the top 1 percent and the nefarious consequences of
this imbalance.

If those concerns are valid, it would be reasonable to
expect that increased inequality at the top should be associated
with a decline in household well-being. That isn’t the case. In
fact, household well-being is much more closely related to
unemployment than it is to the increase in pretax-income
inequality. This implies that policies that focus on reducing
inequality at the top, but don’t reduce unemployment, aren’t
likely to improve well-being.

Happiness Survey

Every two years since the early 1970s, the General Social
Survey has solicited the views of 1,000 to 2,000 Americans on a
large number of questions, including happiness and financial
well-being. To gauge happiness, the GSS asks respondents whether
they are very, pretty, or not too happy. On financial well-being, it asks respondents whether they are pretty well
satisfied, more or less satisfied, or not at all satisfied. The
Nobel prize-winning economists Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen,
among others, have championed the use of such well-being
measures.

I used the GSS to calculate two measures of net well-being.
The first subtracts the percentage of people saying they are not
too happy, from the percentage saying they are very happy. The
second subtracts the percentage of people saying they are not at
all satisfied financially from the percentage who say they are
pretty well satisfied. Both measures should increase when
Americans as a group are better off, and decline when they are
worse off.

The attached graph plots these two measures of well-being
against inequality (the pretax-income share of the top 1
percent) and the unemployment rate from 1980 to 2010. Over that
period, the share of pretax income held by the top 1 percent
first increased markedly from 10 percent in 1980 to a peak of
23.5 percent in 2007 and then declined to about 20 percent in
2010.

The results are clear. Perceived well-being doesn’t decline
as inequality increases. In fact, well-being has tended to
increase with inequality at the top. At the same time, well-being, particularly financial satisfaction, declines when
unemployment is high and it improves when unemployment is low.

During the 1980s, income inequality increased markedly.
Happiness and financial satisfaction also rose. Income
inequality gained markedly from 1994 to 2000, as did happiness
and financial satisfaction. And from 2006 to 2010, inequality
declined markedly and well-being fell, too.

These patterns are decidedly inconsistent with the idea
that income inequality damages Americans’ well-being. Instead,
over the last 30 years, perceived well-being has been positively
correlated with inequality at the top.

Unemployment Effect

That’s not to say all is rosy in these periods. Happiness
and financial satisfaction tend to be negatively related to
unemployment. Well-being increases when unemployment is low and
tends to decrease when unemployment is high. Note the large
increases in happiness and financial satisfaction from 1994 to
2000, a period in which unemployment decreased, but income
inequality increased. Also note the large declines in happiness
and financial satisfaction from 2006 to 2010, a period in which
unemployment increased, but income inequality fell.

This suggests that boosting employment and the economy will
do the most to increase perceived well-being. The data also
suggest that well-being will improve with higher employment even
if inequality also increases; similarly, well-being can decline
even when inequality decreases if the economy doesn’t perform
well.

Put another way, policies that reduce inequality, but at
the same time hurt economic growth aren’t likely to improve
well-being, especially during a recession or weak recovery, when
growth is more likely to boost employment.

These patterns also raise the question of why increases in
pretax-income inequality at the top aren’t associated with
decreases in perceived well-being. One possible answer, as my
University of Chicago colleague Bruce Meyer has pointed out, is
that income inequality isn’t the same as consumption inequality.
Meyer found that consumption inequality -- at least when
comparing the 90th percentile with the 10th percentile -- is
roughly at the same point it was in the early 1980s.

In other words, income taxes are still progressive and
transfers do provide a safety net for those with lower incomes.
Furthermore, when taxes, transfers and inflation are taken into
consideration, after-tax incomes and consumption for the median
family have increased on the order of 50 percent since 1980.

Other researchers have reached similar conclusions. Another
related, but less sanguine answer, attributed to Raghuram Rajan,
also of the University of Chicago, is that the politically
driven availability of credit allowed the less well-off to
maintain their consumption. This may provide part of the
explanation for the patterns in the 2000s, but it seems less
likely to explain those in the 1980s and 1990s.

The conclusion, then, isn’t that inequality is good, but
rather, that income inequality hasn’t been related to perceived
well-being. Income inequality at the top (along with consumption
inequality) doesn’t appear to be all that different from the
levels reached in the late 1990s, when there was far less
criticism. Unemployment, of course, was quite a bit lower then.

Since the financial crisis, the income share of the top 1
percent has decreased at the same time that perceived well-being
has declined substantially. If this history is a guide, then any
new policies that focus on reducing income inequality without
increasing employment and growth aren’t likely to improve well-being. In contrast, policies that increase growth and
employment, even if they maintain, or even increase, pretax-income inequality, seem more likely to be well received by the
public.

(Steven N. Kaplan, a professor of entrepreneurship and
finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business,
is a contributor to Business Class. The opinions expressed are
his own.)

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